{"id":577,"date":"2006-02-07T17:20:55","date_gmt":"2006-02-07T23:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/?p=577"},"modified":"2006-02-04T17:59:53","modified_gmt":"2006-02-04T23:59:53","slug":"revolutionary-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2006\/02\/07\/revolutionary-government\/","title":{"rendered":"Revolutionary Government"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Remember the American Revolution?  When the people rose up and made government respond to their needs and interests?  Seems a new revolution may be emerging in the state of Washington.  It&#8217;s called <a href=\"http:\/\/easycitizeninvolvement.com\/\">Easy Citizen Involvement<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I met <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forumfoundation.org\">Dick Spady<\/a>, the leader of the revolution, at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.recentchangescamp.org\">RecentChangesCamp<\/a> last week.  He&#8217;s working to create something called <em>Citizen Councilors<\/em> in Washington state.  Last year he ran a legislative initiative.  This year he&#8217;ll collect 200,000+ signatures on petitions, to take it directly to the people, on a statewide ballot.<\/p>\n<p>His plan works like this:  Once approved by the people of the state, they will gather $10,000 in donations.  That achieved, they&#8217;ll set up an 800 number to collect 1000 subscriptions for $10 each.  Subscribers will commit to convening conversations of 8-12 neighbors and friends.  Others will sign-up as communicators, to download and print materials for their groups.<\/p>\n<p>While they are gathering subscribers, volunteers and elected officials will work with the State Auditor to produce a set of opinion survey questions that will form the basis for small group conversations throughout the state.  After the conversations, participants will answer the survey questions and submit to the State Auditor for statewide tabulation.  <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a revolutionary invitation to community conversation and feedback mechanism for federal, state and local governing officials.  The Washington Association of Churches is supporting the petition and ballot initiative, giving it a good chance at succeeding.  <\/p>\n<p>See also, Dick&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forumfoundation.org\/sotu.htm\">State-of-the-Union Project<\/a>, which invites and supports similar dialogue programs in schools, using the State of the Union address as the basis for students expressing their own opinions and listening to the opinions of others.  It&#8217;s up and running and ready for classroom use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember the American Revolution? When the people rose up and made government respond to their needs and interests? Seems a new revolution may be emerging in the state of Washington. It&#8217;s called Easy Citizen Involvement. I met Dick Spady, the leader of the revolution, at RecentChangesCamp last week. He&#8217;s working to create something called Citizen &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2006\/02\/07\/revolutionary-government\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Revolutionary Government&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88889,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-care","category-smallchangenews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88889"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaelherman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}